The Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) initiative is a web of interconnected projects --- linking mathematicians and computer scientists to scientists and engineers --- designed to support simulation, data exploration, and collaboration in many thrust areas of the U.S. Department of Energy, including: climate modeling, fusion energy, flows in porous media, chemical and materials science, astrophysics, and high energy and particle physics. SciDAC supports the creation of a new generation of scientific simulation codes for petascale systems (those that can sustain 10**15 floating point operations per second and store 10** Bytes of data). The program also includes research on numerical algorithms and systems software that will allow these codes to use modern parallel computers effectively. The freely available acclaimed solver software "PETSc" is part of the nine-institution "Towards Optimal Petascale Simulations" (TOPS) project within SciDAC and led out of Columbia. As the director of the TOPS project, the speaker will provide an overview of its scope, scientific goals, and mathematical agenda at a "big picture" level.
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